Trump to McCain: Be Careful, at Some Point I’ll Fight Back

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump warned Sen. John McCain that he would “fight back” in response to the Arizona Republican’s thinly veiled attack on the president during an award ceremony Monday night.

“People have to be careful, because at some point I fight back,” Trump said during a radio interview with WMAL host Chris Plante.

“I’m being very nice. I’m being very, very nice. But at some point I fight back, and it won’t be pretty,” Trump continued.

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The tit-for-tat came after McCain chided the “half-baked, spurious nationalism” that has grown prevalent in the United States during and after Trump’s ascent to power.

“To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history,” McCain said Monday in Philadelphia after receiving the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal.

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“We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil,” McCain continued, according to The Hill. “We are the custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad. We have done great good in the world. That leadership has had its costs, but we have become incomparably powerful and wealthy as we did.

“We have a moral obligation to continue in our just cause, and we would bring more than shame on ourselves if we don’t. We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent,” McCain added. “We wouldn’t deserve to.”

McCain has frequently invoked America’s core values in his criticisms of Trump and his “America First” approach to policy.

In May, McCain blasted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for suggesting that America’s foreign policy must stray from its core values at times.

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“With those words, Secretary Tillerson sent a message to oppressed people everywhere: Don’t look to the United States for hope,” McCain wrote in response to Tillerson in an op-ed for The New York Times.

“Depriving the oppressed of a beacon of hope could lose us the world we have built and thrived in,” McCain warned. “It could cost our reputation in history as the nation distinct from all others in our achievements, our identity and our enduring influence on mankind. Our values are central to all three.”